Marvin

danox said:

Apple can do Direct X in their sleep. They haven’t done it because they’ve been busy doing other things but now that’s probably become inevitable. Microsoft by spending $69 billion dollars on Activision shows that they believe in shortcuts and not rolling up their sleeves. I think Apple can do a game engine in their sleep, and they won’t spend more than $3 billion dollars doing it, which by the way is the cost of the largest acquisition Apple has ever made in their history.

Apple has done the equivalent of DirectX with Metal and built an emulator for DirectX.

They could also build a game engine but I would expect them to build off an existing engine than start from scratch. They could build one from the ground up in Swift like a much bigger version of Swift Playgrounds but for cross-platform support, an existing engine has everything they need as well as familiarity with developers. A custom engine would take years to make. Unity is currently valued just under $13b:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U

They lose a lot of money every year so buying them out would come with billions in ongoing losses in the near-term.

They'd probably be better partnering with one or more game studios. They have some close ties with Hideo Kojima. He chose the Decima engine from Guerilla for Death Stranding, this is the engine used in Horizon Zero Dawn.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decima_(game_engine)

If Sony allowed it, Apple could possibly license that, build a UI around it and allow targeting multiple platforms. If they didn't allow it, CryEngine is a good engine too and has been licensed to Amazon. There's not an immediate need for it, Unity can't afford to lose their business so they are going to backtrack and Unreal is still available, despite the ongoing legal issues.

It does highlight a problem that there are only two viable production-quality engines available to game developers in one of the largest industries in the world and they are both proprietary. It's not easy to solve because fixing it requires a lot of investment with almost no return and the work involved would benefit competitors. Open source engines can have better licenses but they'll never have the resources to compete with a for-profit company with full-time devs.

I think the most sustainable solution is to have a core renderer and deployment system as an open source product. That's the hard part and small enough that it can be handled as an open source product by multiple game studios. The rest of the engine like editor and software libraries can be handled by multiple for-profit companies. There can be multiple editors and libraries (physics, particles, tools etc) that can be done by 3rd parties.

mikethemartian said:

Isn’t scarcity by design?

Not the way it's often suggested as a marketing ploy. They always have huge demand in the lead up to Christmas and they can't scale operations up permanently or they'd be excessive in quieter periods so it inevitably creates constraints. Plus they have mentioned in the past that they can correct product defects in early models if they are caught quickly enough.

The peak in the lead up to the holiday season just after launch is nearly 2x every other period.

This is up to around 90 million units in a quarter. Foxconn has over 500,000 employees and the following says they can assemble 500k iPhones per day:

https://www.knowyourmobile.com/news/how-many-iphones-does-apple-make-a-day/

To cover 90 million units, that's 180 days (6 months) to cover the last quarter of the year. This requires a 3 month lead time on manufacturing and then running 24/7 up until the holidays. They'd need to hire hundreds of thousands more employees to improve the supply constraint but then they aren't needed later on.

The system they have now works just fine. People usually only have to wait a few weeks.

Japhey said:

Gaming blogs are making a bigger deal out of this than the Apple blogs are. 

Bringing AAA games to iPhones is a big thing, especially if they get momentum from other big studios.

One sticking point will be price. Console players are used to paying $60 for a game, mobile players aren't (yet). It's reported they will go a similar route as Nintendo with Super Mario Run where it's free to play the first level and then ask for a full game purchase. This will let mobile players see if the game runs ok on their device and the controls feel good:

https://toucharcade.com/2023/09/13/resident-evil-4-remake-ipad-macos-iphone-pro-supported-devices-price-purchase-village-release-date/

I don't think they'll manage $60 but they said it would be single purchase and the Mac version would likely be that price, maybe the Mac version will be separate and shared just for iPhone/iPad. Square Enix charges relatively high prices with some of their games:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app-bundle/final-fantasy-iv-complete-pac/id918388546 ($15 per game)

Capcom charges $40 for Resident Evil Village on Switch. I think $20 would be the limit for a single purchase for mobile. They'd probably be better redesigning parts of the game like charge for save ribbons, weapons, lockpicks. $5 for weapons pack, $5 for costumes, $2 for a ribbon pack, $20 for the game etc. People always say they don't want to be microtransactioned to death but that's the only way people buy things on mobile. Maybe these games can change that habit but I doubt it, not in the short-term anyway.

The sales potential is huge. 1.5 billion iPhone/iPad users, only newer devices can play them of course but if they get 20 million sales at $20, that's $400m (-30%) from one platform.

9secondkox2 said:

I don’t know man. Was expecting much more. Especially after the move to 3nm and the last two generations being about the same (7% difference). Kinda disappointed. Especially since battery life didn’t take a noticeable leap up. Almost as if there were no cpu architectural improvements. 

atomic101 said:

This just goes to show that the honeymoon period of early A-series chip development is over.  Apple engineers have essentially perfected the fundamental designs of these chips such that there are no "easy" optimizations sitting out there as low-hanging fruit.  The days of 50%, 40%, or 30% year-over-year performance gains are over.... at least until some other paradigm shift in semiconductors arrives.

The Apple/ARM architecture has a great number of advantages over the legacy x86 line of processors, but any illusion of these things continuing their moonshot trajectories should be dampened by reality.

Still, gains and optimizations year-over-year are still very welcome.

They have to use 3nm for 2023, 2024 and 2025 iPhones, they can't throw everything in the first version and have nothing for the next two models.

The number of transistors went up to 19b in A17 vs 16b in A16 so that's nearly 20% more raw hardware. iPhones don't need much CPU improvement, they benefit more from lower power and we still have to see improvements to the GPU.

For the Mac, the M3 Max was reported to have 50% more performance CPU cores. 10% more per core x 50% more cores = 65% CPU improvement vs M2 Max.

GPU cores were reported to have gone up less, around 5% more cores. If those have improved 20% per core, that's a 25% GPU boost. While that's a bit disappointing, they can add more cores for the next revisions and get another 25% boost next year.

By the last 3nm revision in 2025, they should be around 2x M2 performance before 2nm and they will do the same in 2026-2029 where 2029 Macs/iPhones are 2x 2025 models (M6-8 Max = 40TFLOPs+).

The big improvement this year will be from hardware raytracing, this is also rumored to be in the Nintendo Switch 2:

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-ampere-powered-soc-for-next-gen-nintendo-switch-2-handheld-spotted/

This will use an 8nm chip with 12GB RAM and reportedly launch next year. This iPhone can be an equivalent target for game devs.

mpantone said:

Hreb said:

Any word if the macos port will be based on the DirectX 11 version or the vulkan version of the engine for Baldur's Gate 3?  Perhaps a compatibility layer wrapped around either?  Or a completely separate metal implementation (unlikely)?

According to PCGamingWiki

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Baldur's_Gate_3

there is both Metal API and Arm executable support.

I'll take that with a large grain of salt and wait for analyses after the actual macOS launch. For sure there are people in a closed beta playing as we speak. I'm not a game developer and I don't have any working knowledge of the Divinity 4.0 engine.

I don't know if Larian intends on eventually bringing Baldur's Gate 3 to iOS but they would really need to consider Metal for good performance on iDevices. Divinity: Original 2 is available on the App Store for iPhones and iPads so we can be hopeful...

At this point in time, I think Mac gaming is more of a stepping stone to iOS gaming than an end goal. People game more on the go these days (and much more in some markets like Japan), hence the popularity of hybrid devices like Nintendo Switch and the emergence of mobile PC gaming devices like the Steam Deck et al.

The notion of video gaming in front of a computer monitor or television set with a keyboard and mouse does not reflect today's gaming marketplace.

There's an FAQ here:

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=874803#Post874803

"Does the macOS version support eGPU?
Yes it does.

Why do I have to upgrade my macOS version?
Baldur's Gate 3 is a native macOS application that requires Metal 2.3 features. Metal is Apple's own graphics and shader API included with macOS. To make full use of all its power, at least macOS 10.15.6 is required.

I'm interested in what's under the hood. What kind of MacOS port is this?
The macOS build of Baldur's Gate 3 does not use MoltenVK: it uses Metal 2.3. The Metal renderer is completely standalone. There is no Windows API code running, It's fully compiled by XCode 11.5.

Can I buy the game on the macOS App Store?
The macOS version is currently only available on Steam and GOG."